30West, the investment and advisory firm with deep ties to the movie business, is backing Special, a new streaming service geared towards independent moviemakers and content creators. The platform, which had its beta launch last week, was co-founded by Sam Lucas and Paul Burton.
Source: 30West Invests in Special, Independent Distribution Platform (EXCLUSIVE)
In the last few years, everyone from Barry Manilow to Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders to Nikki Sixx of Motley Crüe to Journey has cashed in by making similar deals with the Hipgnosis Songs Fund, which is run by Quebec-born Merck Mercuriadis. Its portfolio of songs is so big — it’s somewhere north of 5,000 — that the company trades on the London FTSE and has raised well over a billion dollars to acquire even more song copyrights.
Source: Why are so many artists selling off their song catalogues to faceless companies?
A coalition of music industry groups including the RIAA, NMPA and Artist Rights Alliance today (Nov. 23) sent the latest in a string of recent letters to congressional leaders, urging them to provide additional government assistance to music industry workers impacted by the coronavirus pandemic.
Source: Music Groups Again Pressure Congress For Pandemic Relief: ‘More Must Be Done’
Roblox averages 100 million monthly active users between the ages of 12 and 18. That’s a prime target for the music industry. Kids are spending hours upon hours of time on the platform, and artists and labels are taking notice. Nearly half of all children aged 9-12 in the US play Roblox at least once a week.
Source: Roblox Files for IPO — Music Is a Cornerstone Strategy for Growth
The dynamics of streaming are fundamentally different to the old-world, which means contracts based on “unit sales” risk being redundant in a market based increasingly on streaming. As a result, we need fundamental changes such as the writing-off of unrecouped balances after a set period of time, say 15 years, and a modern and fair artist royalty rate on all digital revenues.
The news of the JV follows the announcement earlier this month that the Atlantic Screen Media fund, through which Atlantic Screen Music provides financing for the production of music scores – is raising £10 million ($13.2m) to invest in global streamed content IP, including music scores for film and television, plus comic books.
YouTube says it will start putting ads on some videos from channels that are not part of its partnership scheme. Changes to its terms of service mean YouTube will not share the revenue from those ads with the video-makers. YouTube’s Partner Program is something that has to be applied for, and is only available to channels that have more than 1,000 subscribers and have clocked up 4,000 hours of people watching in a year.
The year is 2023. After intensive lobbying, the governments of the US, the EU, and Britain have decreed changes to the way music streaming services pay out artists. Instead of pooling all of users’ revenue together and distributing it pro-rata based on the number of streams, the money will now be divided based on listening-share per user.
Source: What does digital strategy in a user-centric streaming landscape look like?
The Royalty Fund III is separate to a new royalty fund (Round Hill Music Royalty Fund Ltd) that Round Hill floated on the London Stock Exchange last week, which raised $282m ahead of its IPO. That $282m was $93m lower than the $375m Round Hill was hoping to raise.
Source: Round Hill raises another $291m in third royalty fund (and has already spent most of it)
Since the start of the pandemic, direct-to-fan platform Bandcamp has been waiving its revenue share for one day each month, on so called ‘Bandcamp Fridays’. Now, the company is launching a new ticketed live streaming service called Bandcamp Live, and it will be waiving its 10% fee for the service until March 3, 2021.
Source: Bandcamp expands into ticketed livestreams, with Bandcamp Live